The ORIGINAL gathering place for a merry band of Three Percenters. (As denounced by Bill Clinton on CNN!)

Friday, June 25, 2010

Sulphuric Acid as a Tactic.

Journalist Victor Riesel, before and after his blinding in an acid attack by union mob goons.

When I was a boy growing up in Marion, Ohio, there was a syndicated column that appeared every week written by Victor Riesel. The column, accompanied by a stark line line drawing showing a middle-aged man in a hat with dark glasses, was always tight, well-written and made its points effectively. When I read of Riesel's death in 1995, I mourned. Riesel was first and foremost anti-totalitarian. As the threat of fascism receded after World War II, he began to concentrate on the hideous nature of communism and, closer to home, the cancer of the mob-dominated unions.

Victor's daddy had been a union organizer, as Wikipedia reports:

When Victor was three years old, his father taught him to make pro-union speeches and would take his son to rallies and union meetings and have the boy recite the speeches for onlookers. Attending union meetings, indoor and outdoor rallies, and standing on street corners promoting the union formed many of Victor Riesel's childhood and teenage memories. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nathan Riesel successfully opposed Communist Party USA attempts to infiltrate activists into the local union and turning its purpose to promotion of the party (a strategy known as "boring from within"). Throughout his childhood and teenage years, he saw his father come home bleeding many times after fistfights with communist activists or gangsters. This conflict left a deep impression on Victor. . .

Two additional events in Riesel's life led him to a career as a labor reporter. The first occurred in March 6, 1930, during a visit to his father's union offices. Riesel saw a man weeping on the stairs because he had no job and his famiy had no food to eat. The second occurred in 1942. Nathan Riesel was now fighting organized crime influence in his union, and despaired of keeping his local out of criminal hands. Nathan Riesel was very badly beaten by gangsters in 1942, and died five years later (in part due to the injuries suffered during and surgeries related to this attack). . .

Victor Riesel's labor journalism career formally began in 1937 when he started writing a regular column on labor union issues.

He was hired by The New York Post in 1941. His column became nationally syndicated in 1942. He left the Post in 1948 after a change in management, and joined William Randolph Hearst's New York Daily Mirror. Within eight years, his column was syndicated in 193 newspapers.

His investigation of Communist Party infiltration of the National Maritime Union led Representative Louis B. Heller to introduce legislation in 1951 to investigate the charges. In 1951 and 1952, Riesel provided Senator Pat McCarran with information that led to a Senate investigation into communist influence in the United Public Workers of America. In 1952, he publicly alleged before the Subcommittee on Internal Security (led at the time by Sen. McCarran) that Local 65 of the Distributive, Processing and Office Workers of America was controlled by the Communist Party. The same year, he denounced Genovese crime family boss Anthony "Tough Tony" Anastasio for engaging in labor racketeering. Anastasio sued Riesel for $1 million for libel, but the suit was thrown out of court. In 1956, Riesel began working with United States Attorney Paul Williams to rein in labor racketeering in the New York City garment and trucking industries.

Riesel was fearless. So the labor mobsters decided to send him a message. As the New York Times reported in his obituary:

In a crime that shocked the nation, Mr. Riesel was assaulted just after leaving Lindy's restaurant in midtown Manhattan at 3 A.M. on April 5, 1956. An hour earlier, he had finished a radio broadcast in which he assailed the leadership of a Long Island local of the International Union of Operating Engineers.

"I wasn't important as a man, but I was important as a symbol," Mr. Riesel (pronounced re-ZELL) wrote later. "The attack on me was an attack on the entire free press, challenging its right to expose crime and injustice. In hitting me, the underworld was thumbing its nose at the community and the forces of law and order."

Accompanied by a friend and his secretary, Mr. Riesel was headed for his car on 51st Street that night when a young man emerged from the shadows near the Mark Hellinger Theater.

"The acid caught me right between the eyes," he wrote. "He stood there calmly for a moment, deliberately appraising his work. Then he ambled away."

One month later, doctors told Mr. Riesel that he would never see again.

"There was no terror at the moment when I knew I had crossed the line into permanent darkness," Mr. Riesel wrote. "There was only a sudden feeling of shame. I was afraid that people would treat me too gently or shy away from me as though from a freak. And suddenly, I wondered if I could go on writing and earning a living."

But he did.

Abe Telvi, the man accused of throwing the acid, was found dead on Mulberry Street on the morning of July 28, 1956. There was a bullet in his head.

On Aug. 18, the F.B.I. arrested eight men and said the blinding was the work of garment district terrorists determined to silence Mr. Riesel.

Despite his blinding, Mr. Riesel never stopped inveighing against gangster infiltration and other corruption in labor unions that had stirred his emotions since his youth.

His column, which appeared locally in The Daily Mirror in New York, was syndicated to as many as 350 newspapers at its height.

Riesel's blinding was not the work of some small potatoes in the union/mob cabal. As the New York Times reported here,

Riesel attacked racketeering in Local 138 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, based in Long Island. . . . Riesel had also attacked (Jimmy) Hoffa, who was maneuvering from his Middle Western base to take over the national leadership of the Teamsters. . . The police learned that the acid thrower was a 22-year-old apprentice hoodlum named Abraham Telvi, who disappeared for a while. They arrested a second-level labor hoodlum -- and Hoffa crony -- named John DioGuardia (better known as Johnny Dio) and charged him with ordering the attack. But witnesses suddenly developed amnesia and Johnny Dio went free. When Telvi, who had been paid $1,175 by middlemen to do the job, understood the importance of his victim, he demanded more money. He was murdered on July 28 on the Lower East Side, not far from where Riesel grew up. . . (I)n Sheridan's 1972 book, "The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa," he relates a tale told to him by an honest teamster named Sam Baron, who was in a hotel room with Hoffa one night in 1956:

Hoffa went into another room to take a phone call and then came back into the room where Baron . . . and others were gathered. According to Baron, Hoffa walked up to him and poked his finger in his chest, saying, "Hey, Baron, a friend of yours got it this morning."

"What do you mean?" Baron asked.

"That son of a bitch Victor Riesel. He just had some acid thrown on him. It's too bad he didn't have it thrown on the goddamn hands he types with."

The cynical said that the blinding made Victor Riesel's career. The truth was that his indomitable courage against tyranny of any kind attracted readership and the blinding, horrific as it was, merely brought his work to a larger audience and gave him far more influence than he had ever had before.

Victor Riesel came to mind when I read this piece posted at Restore the Constitution by Daniel Almond, in which he discusses the use of sulphuric acid as a tactic.

A few years back it was "cold dead hands" then its "take the fight to the enemy" now its GG stuff -- then its mutilate them -- where do you draw the line ? Go after the family? The social network? The waitress who served them coffee? Her family ? This is basically something close to tribal warfare dolled up as 3% politics --

And yes I am aware that these are a minority even among the 3%'rs and that I sound like the Southern Poverty Law Center (and thats not necessarily a good thing) but it does seem to me that rheotoric has gone into some bad places of late.

These are areas where the people saying it are not going for "lets kill our enemies and restore our vision of the Republic"which is bad enough but into "once this is done we will have to exterminate our possible foes" because frankly once you've crossed certain moral thresholds thats the only sound conclusion. You've lost the moral war, they will never want to caucus or cooperate with you, you have to murder or enslave them.

Here is my comment left at Global Guerrillas:

Mike Vanderboegh said...

As the guy who popularized the concept of the Three Percent, the guy who wrote letters to Attorney General Holder reminding him that there are "No more free Wacos" and "No more free Katrinas," the guy whose call to break the windows of local Democrat Party headquarters was answered by some folks around the country and subsequently denounced by the whole MSNBC crowd as well as Bill Clinton, as the guy who subsequently received death threats from the collectivist left, including envelopes with powder in them, which included threats to my family, as the guy whose arrest under the PATRIOT Act, incarceration at Guantanamo and prison rape was demanded by these self-same "leftists," I have a comment.

The entire thrust of my work for the last fifteen years has been to try to avoid a civil war by reminding people of how possible one is, and how horrible they are once they get started. Only by establishing credible deterrence can one be avoided. This means, as I said back during the 90s to an impatient gun confiscationist who demanded to know my position in the fewest possible words:

"If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

When I warned Holder that there would be no more free Wacos, that is merely the above sentiment writ large. The purpose of the Three Percent is to draw a line, not in the sand, but etched in granite that we will obey no more restrictionist gun laws. Period.

Insofar as horror is concerned, you have to get to the macro government level before you really begin to experience that. Take the Clinton Administration for example.

Ever see the forensic photos of the dead babies at Waco? That was done by a government -- our government -- THEIR government -- with clinical, calculated coldness. No one ever experienced the least inconvenience over 80 dead Davidians.

Later, Bill Clinton did us another favor when he was finding the Serbians a bit irritating. He changed the rules of engagement to allow attacks on the political leadership, the news media and the intellectual underpinnings of his enemies. In pursuance of this policy, he put precision guided munitions into the homes of Serb politicians, and the broadcast facilities of Serbian radio and television (oh, yeah, and a Chinese embassy, but who's counting?). All he managed to kill (other than the Chinese) were some security guards, floor sweepers and make-up artists.

So, following Clinton's example, if some tyrant wannabes in this country kick off a civil war, why shouldn't we also target, a la 4GW, the politicians, talking heads and intellectual supporters of said tyranny?

I mean, Bill Clinton said it was OK, right?

While I certainly have not embraced or endorsed sulphuric acid as a tactic, I wonder what would be said today if someone had done so to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Mao?

The larger point is this: Take a look around. If you think that tyranny cannot come to this country, you're whistling past the graveyard of history.

And when, not if, that some tyrant wannabe decides his appetite is greater than the threat of retaliation, do you really think that someone throwing acid in the face of a killer bureaucrat, an American Eichmann, will be anything more than passing headline? By that time the bodies will be stacked too high to see.

But enunciated NOW, as a cautionary tale, might just prevent someone from doing something stupid because he or she thinks they can get away with it.

We are not revolutionaries trying to tell folks what to do. They are the revolutionaries against the Founders' Republic. The fact that they are Gramscian gradualists does not alter this fact. It is we who are Restorationists. All we want is the Founders' Republic and the rule of law once more. Failing that, we want, no, we demand, to be left the hell alone. Yet their appetites will not allow them to leave us alone.

And now that they feel themselves so close, and yet with the opportunity seemingly slipping away, is when they are the most dangerous to public liberty and private property.

So if a story breaks through to their consciousness that there are possible terrible unintended consequences for their tyrannical appetites, then I say all the better.

Let them look in the mirror and imagine a ruined face. It would be, in that horrible event forced upon us by their tyrannical actions, the least awful outcome for them, and certainly far less than they would already be inflicting upon their innocent countrymen.

If they wish, as Bill Clinton apparently does, to make us Three Percenters the new boogeymen then I am willing to embrace the slur. If it prevents the outbreak of accidental civil war in this country, I can spare my reputation.

For it is better to be despised by the despicable than admired by the admirable. And to be denounced by a serial perjurer and rapist is perhaps the greatest honor of all.

Mike VanderboeghThe alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percentershttp://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com

Moral component set aside (and I don't, but let's do it for the purposes of argument), like the threat of torture is far more effective than torture itself, I think discussion of this -- planting the seed of possibility in the enemy's head -- is far more effective than actually carrying it out. Just ask Victor Riesel's enemies. They made him far more powerful and effective by blinding him than anything else they could have done. They maimed him, yes, but they did not intimidate him, they did not take him out of the equation. Indeed, he emerged as a much more implacable foe of theirs than he had been before.

13 comments:

There is a disconnect between the alleged purpose of restoring the Constitution and violating a fundamental principle of constitutional law--lex talionis.

How does one uphold the US Constitution and Bill of Rights using methods inimical to the spirit of that document, in particular, the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the Eighth Amendment?

Does the recommended course of action--acid attack--comport well with the principle of "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" set out in the law codes of every civilization from the days of Hammurabi to the present time?

Will an acid attack promote civil society and freedom's cause? In Iraq, similarly horrific methods were used by Al Qaeda. It turned the local populace against them and lead to their annihilation at the hands of the US Army.

If you choose to fight a tyrannical government, make certain you are not promoting a worse alternative.

For my part, I would not hesitate to stop an acid attack or some such similar activity. I would unhesitatingly kill the attacker without feeling a scintilla of remorse. Failing that, I would reveal the attacker's name to someone with authority to prosecute the matter.

Anarchist ought not to presume that constitutionalists share their commitment to lawlessness and constitutionalists must resist Anarchistic Man to the same degree that they oppose the Total State.

But there are times when the soil is too hard packed (dense) to allow the seed to take root. Or already too acidic to permit healthy fruition. Sometimes you have to use the tiller and apply treatments to boost the seed's chances.

'Cautionary tales' have a different ruleset. Those who write such are not necessarily suggesting that the events which make up 'the tale' are good things or nice things or proper things.

Before criticising the content of such a cautionary tale, it is good to reflect that in times such as we see approaching, things that are neither good nor nice nor proper nevertheless happen, because 'real life' is real life.

We may cluck our tongues at the use of H2SO4 on Victor Riesel (rest his soul), but he still died blind.

This is part of what I posed over at at the Resore The Constitution.----------------------------------I see a few of my brothers here discussing death and the things that are sure to happen. We all, I believe are aware of the terrible things that will occur, but what I have seen and heard from most of you here and at other sites on the net is that it won´t be us that start the atrocities. In fact some if not most would kill someone that they saw committing what would be defined as a ¨war¨crime. And would try prevent one of our brothers/sisters from wrecking vengeance on someone, for acts that had been committed against family and friends. If I thought any less than that I would not be here with you. --------------------------------- Criminals that would or will do such things do Not want to be in My company while attempting such acts I will have nothing to do with such people.This does not meen that I believe in a Fair Fight only the survivors deside what was fair, But I do Plan to win.

IIRC "the International Union of Operating Engineers, based in Long Island" is the union for the railroad engineers on the Long Island Rail Road.. the guys that drive the trains.Thanks for posting that.. I've been telling people about commie unions for 30 years.

Apart from the moral horror of deliberately maiming with noxious substances*

Sulphuric is too useful a substance to waste by throwing it in faces.

Sulphuric displaces all other acids from their compounds - eg nitric acid from nitrates, perchloric acid from perchlorates. phosphoric acid from old bones. reducing the phosphoric with carbon gives phosphorus...

In MHO you are playing into their hands by making threats of violence. I do not intend to die for the cause. I intend to vote on Nov 2nd and encourage others to do the same. I intend to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. If the worst happens I will help my family, friends and nieghbors to the extent that I can. I will not threaten violence and I will not commit violence unless it is necessary to defend myself, my family or other innocent people. I love and respect our military, law enforcement, doctors, nurses, firemen, EMT's and I will assist them in any way I can. If TSHTF I intend to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Sometimes the punishment must fit the crime!Given the horrors that the Anti-gun/Anti-self-defense crowd ushered in to the world. Can anything be worse than what they are mostly already responsible for?

I prefer quick clean kills. But they have earned the opposite.

No I am not interested in revenge God claimed it and he can have it.

I will however deliver remorseless retribution if it must come to a fight!

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

On the efficacy of passive resistance in the face of the collectivist beast. . .

Had the Japanese got as far as India, Gandhi's theories of "passive resistance" would have floated down the Ganges River with his bayoneted, beheaded carcass. -- Mike Vanderboegh.

In the future . . .

When the histories are written, “National Rifle Association” will be cross-referenced with “Judenrat.” -- Mike Vanderboegh to Sebastian at "Snowflakes in Hell"

"Smash the bloody mirror."

If you find yourself through the looking glass, where the verities of the world you knew and loved no longer apply, there is only one thing to do. Knock the Red Queen on her ass, turn around, and smash the bloody mirror. -- Mike Vanderboegh

From Kurt Hoffman over at Armed and Safe.

"I believe that being despised by the despicable is as good as being admired by the admirable."

From long experience myself, I can only say, "You betcha."

"Only cowards dare cringe."

The fears of man are many. He fears the shadow of death and the closed doors of the future. He is afraid for his friends and for his sons and of the specter of tomorrow. All his life's journey he walks in the lonely corridors of his controlled fears, if he is a man. For only fools will strut, and only cowards dare cringe. -- James Warner Bellah, "Spanish Man's Grave" in Reveille, Curtis Publishing, 1947.

"We fight an enemy that never sleeps."

"As our enemies work bit by bit to deconstruct, we must work bit by bit to REconstruct. Be mindful where we should be. Set goals. We fight an enemy that never sleeps. We must learn to sleep less." -- Mike H. at What McAuliffe Said

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.